Jane Elliott's famous exercise, race 50 years later

Jane Elliott explains how distortions on a map can mislead students, making some countries appear bigger than they actually are. Students have to pay attention - and speak up, she said. Karina Bland/The Republic

Jane Elliott's famous exercise, race 50 years later

Jane Elliott explains how distortions on a map can mislead students, making some countries appear bigger than they actually are. Students have to pay attention - and speak up, she said.
Karina Bland/The Republic

Jane Elliott speaks with students at Arizona State University on Thursday, Nov. 9, 2017. Karina Bland/The Republic

Jane Elliott's famous exercise, race 50 years later

Jane Elliott speaks with students at Arizona State University on Thursday, Nov. 9, 2017.
Karina Bland/The Republic

Neal Lester, a professor and founding director of ASU’s Project Humanities, had not expected such an enthusiastic response to Jane Elliott's appearance. The event was free but the first 700 tickets were snapped up in less than two hours. The waiting list grew to 400. So the event was moved to a larger venue, Central High, which also filled up. Sarah Elliott/Special to The Republic

Jane Elliott's famous exercise, race 50 years later

Neal Lester, a professor and founding director of ASU’s Project Humanities, had not expected such an enthusiastic response to Jane Elliott's appearance. The event was free but the first 700 tickets were snapped up in less than two hours. The waiting list grew to 400. So the event was moved to a larger venue, Central High, which also filled up.
Sarah Elliott/Special to The Republic

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Jane Elliott speaks with students at Arizona State University on Nov. 9. "You’re not born a bigot. You have to learn to be a bigot, and anything you learn you can unlearn,” she said.(Photo: Karina Bland/The Republic)

She has been talking about how ridiculous it is to judge someone based on the color of their skin for almost 50 years. She can hardly believe she still has to say it.

“We need to fix this,” she says.

Elliot is best known as the teacher who, on April 5, 1968, the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, put her third-grade students through a bold exercise to teach them about racial prejudice.

She divided the children, who were all white, by eye color, and then she told the children that people with brown eyes were smarter, faster and better than those with blue eyes.

“If it can be learned, it can be unlearned.”

Jane Elliott

What happened next proved to Elliot that prejudice is a learned behavior.

Which means, she says, it can be unlearned.

It was an exercise that would catapult her into a heated national discussion, land her on television and in newspapers, and eventually make her the subject of a half-dozen documentaries and a mainstay in textbooks.

All these years later, Elliott hasn't stopped talking about what she learned. She thinks her message is more important than ever amid growing conflict over race. She minces no words. She wants you to listen. Really listen.

Maybe you will learn something, too.

One race, the human race

“It’s 10 o’clock, and we’re going to start now,” Elliott announced. It was a Thursday morning, and she was speaking in the Memorial Union at Arizona State University.

About 25 people are there, mostly students, and a few invited guests.

Elliott would speak later that day to a full auditorium of1,200 people at Central High School in Phoenix as part of ASU’s Project Humanities campaign to create opportunities for dialogue about issues like this.

As part of her visit, Elliott had asked to speak with a small group of students.

She got right to it.

“Anybody here who considers themselves a member of the white race, stand up,” Elliott said. A handful of people stood.

“Anybody here who considers themselves a member of the black race, stand up.” Ten or so people got up.

“Stand up if you consider yourself part of the brown race,” she said next.

“Hispanic,” one young man corrected as he stood.

“They said, ‘I found out what it felt like to be on the bottom, and I did not want to make anyone feel like that ever again.'”

Jane Elliott

People glanced at each other awkwardly as Elliott continued. “Stand up if you consider yourself part of the yellow race,” she said. “Stand up if you consider yourself part of the red race,” she said, until everyone was standing.

Elliott studied the room.

“Now everyone who considers themselves part of the human race, sit down,” she said.

Everyone sat down.

This is important to understand, she said. She paused, looking into the faces in front of her.

“There are not four or five different races. There is only one race on the face of the earth, and we are all members of that race — the human race,” Elliott said.

Yes, Elliott knows we have been taught that people can be divided into groups based on shared inherited physical characteristics.

But science has shown that human physical variations don’t fit into neat racial categories, she says. They overlap. Because, genetically, DNA analyses show, all humans are more alike than they are different. Scientists agree that biological races do not exist among humans.

“It is a lie perpetuated so some of us can see ourselves as superior to others,” Elliott said. “You’ve got to stop believing it, and you have got to stop living it.”

Judging people based on skin color is as ridiculous as judging people based on eye color — or gender, religion or sexual orientation, she said. “It’s indecent, it’s not fair and it’s ignorant.”

That was what she wanted to teach her students all those years ago.

“How many of you have seen this map or one just like it?” Jane Elliott asked. Every hand went up. It’s a Mercator projection map, widely used in American schools and universities. Elliott explained how it is distorted, the equator two-thirds of the way down, making North America and Europe — both majority white countries — look like they are the center of the world and bigger than they actually are. Africa seems half the size of Greenland. Alaska looks bigger than Mexico. "This is not just ridiculous — it is deliberate," she said.(Photo: Karina Bland/The Republic)

The exercise: Brown eyes, blue eyes

Elliott taught third graders at a school in Riceville, Iowa, a small town in rural northern Iowa.

Her 28 students had filed into the classroom the morning after King was assassinated, talking about what had happened.

“How do you think it would feel to be a Negro boy or girl?” Elliott had asked her students. All of the children were white.

“It would be hard to know, wouldn’t it, unless we actually experienced discrimination ourselves? Would you like to find out?”

The children had answered eagerly, “Yes!”

Elliot separated the blue-eyed children from the children with brown and green eyes. She had the blue-eyed children put on green construction paper armbands.

And then she told the children that the brown-eyed students were smarter.

Elliott came up with an explanation: Intelligence, she told the children, was determined by melanin. She wrote the word on the board. The more melanin, the darker the person’s eyes — and the smarter the person.

A child noted that Elliott was a “bluey,” yet she was a teacher. A boy piped up to explain that if she had had brown eyes, she would be the principal or superintendent.

Elliott sent the brown-eyed children to lunch first and gave them a longer recess. The brown-eyed children could drink from the water fountain, but the blue-eyed children had to use paper cups.

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The change was instant, Elliott said. The children with brown eyes were suddenly more confident — and condescending. They hurled nasty insults at the blue-eyed kids.

The children with blue eyes made silly mistakes and became timid and despondent.

The two groups stopped playing together. Fights broke out.

“I watched them exhibit all the behaviors the significant adults in their lives modeled for them,” Elliott said. “I didn’t like what I saw.”

What Elliott said she learned from the exercise was that people are not born prejudiced but learn the behavior. And if it can be learned, she said, it can be unlearned.

'Why is no one outraged about that?'

After the exercise, Elliott asked her students to write about what they had learned, and their essays ran in the Riceville Recorder under the headline, “How Discrimination Feels.”

The Associated Press did a follow-up story. Johnny Carson invited her to be on his show.

When Elliott returned to Riceville, population 840 at the time, from her appearance on “The Tonight Show,” she found her town divided. The other teachers, save a few, snubbed her. Her children were bullied at school, her oldest son beaten up.

She got mail from people who said the exercise taught white children self-contempt and abused their trust. She received death threats.

“Prejudice is an attitude. It can’t hurt anyone. But discrimination is a behavior, and people get killed because of it every day.”

Jane Elliott

While controversial, her exercise would be cited as a social science landmark. Textbook publisher McGraw-Hill listed Elliott on a timeline of 30 notable educators, along with Plato, Horace Mann, Booker T. Washington and Maria Montessori.

Elliott continued to conduct the exercise in Riceville for nine more years in her third-grade class and another eight years with her seventh- and eighth-grade students.

She argued that it taught children that prejudice was arbitrary and illogical and helped develop empathy.

“It was one day,” Elliott said. “We are worried about white children who experience a couple of hours of made-up racism for one day when children of color experience real racism every day of their lives.

“Why is no one outraged about that?”

It would have made life easier if Elliott had kept quiet after that, but she said she couldn’t.

“Prejudice is an attitude. It can’t hurt anyone,” she said. “But discrimination is a behavior, and people get killed because of it every day.”

When it is uncomfortable

Neal Lester, a professor and founding director of ASU’s Project Humanities, had not expected such an enthusiastic response to Jane Elliott's appearance. The event was free but the first 700 tickets were snapped up in less than two hours. The waiting list grew to 400. So the event was moved to a larger venue, Central High, which also filled up.(Photo: Sarah Elliott/Special to The Republic)

At ASU, Elliott asked a young man sitting up front if anyone ever referred to him as bi-racial. He nodded. Yes. The next time someone said it, she said, he should respond with, “What other planet do you think I’m from?”

Because, she reminded him, holding up one finger, “One race. The human race.”

Then she asked a young woman, "Has anyone ever said to you, ‘I don’t see you as black?'”

The woman nodded.

“What did you say?” Elliott asked and when the woman hesitated, she continued: “You were polite, weren’t you? You smiled and didn’t say anything.

Because of course, people see color. They pick the color of their car, and of their couch.

“You know why they say that? Because your skin color makes them uncomfortable," Elliott said. "If white folks are uncomfortable because of your skin color, that is because they are ignorant.”

Don’t let people get away with saying things like that, Elliott said. “If we don’t start confronting racist remarks, they will continue to be acceptable,” she said.

The rules of listening

Suddenly Elliot stopped talking, put one hand on her hip and stared at someone in the back of the room who was using a cell phone.

“You’re not listening,” Elliott said simply. She turned and noticed another student on the other side of the room with a video camera pointed at her.

“Did I give permission?” she asked. “Turn it off.” She told him to put it away, sit in a chair and listen.

We learn a lot by listening, Elliott said, but there are rules. The first one: Good listeners have quiet hands, feet and mouths.

“What other planet do you think I’m from? If white folks are uncomfortable because of your skin color, that is because they are ignorant.”

Jane Elliott

Elliott looked at a young man chewing a cookie. He was suddenly still.

“How are you going to swallow that without moving your mouth?” she said. He swallowed hard and pushed the rest of the cookie on a napkin away from him. So did other people at other tables.

Elliott had thought America had made some positive progress in terms of racism, at least until recently. She thinks she knows why.

“This is the response of white people to eight years of a black man in the White House,” Elliott said.

“That means that we didn’t make progress in the first place. We made people go underground and that’s what they did.”

Now, she said, “It’s like when I go off a diet and eat like a fool.”

“We had to give up our ignorant statements and behaviors for a while, and now the lid is off,” she said.

People can say anything they want now, even march in the streets with swastikas on their arms, she said, and President Donald Trump would say there are “some very fine people” among them.

“Now they can do and be and say anything they want to because they can get away with it,” she said.

Elliott said we have a responsibility to speak up when we hear racist talk and take action when we witness discrimination.

“You can make a difference if you chose to," she said, "or you can just leave these things as they are."

Decide to learn something

After speaking at Arizona State University, Jane Elliott took pictures with students. Here, she hugs Danielle Archey, of Houston, Texas.(Photo: Karina Bland/The Republic)

Elliott told the students that one of the driving forces in this election was the projection that, within 30 years, white people will have lost their numerical majority in the United States.

“If you are thinking, ‘We are here to talk about racism, so why is she talking about politics?’ you should know that there is nothing in this country that is not impacted by racism,” Elliott said.

She stopped talking again, this time because a woman was taking notes, her head down. Elliott waited until the woman looked up.

The second rule of listening: Good listeners keep their eyes on the person who is speaking.

Elliott sighed. She might as well get all the rules out at once, she said.

The third rule: Good listeners listen from the beginning to the very end.

No interruptions. No thinking about counter-arguments, or what you are going to say when you get a chance.

And then, probably the most important rule: Good listeners decide to learn something.

“If you are thinking, ‘We are here to talk about racism, so why is she talking about politics?’ you should know that there is nothing in this country that is not impacted by racism.”

Jane Elliott

Afterward, Elliott said listening is imperative for this kind of conversation to take place.

“The listening skills are something that I teach for the classroom," she said, "and for every minute of our lives."

Nothing they could Google or see on their Facebook feed is going to be as real and have the same kind of impact as listening to the person in front of them.

“And if you are going to learn anything, you have to listen, and you have to decide to learn.

“That’s the most important one. You have to decide to learn.”

The exercise: Blue eyes, brown eyes

Elliott left teaching in 1985 and since then, she has traveled the world speaking and sometimes conducting the eye-color exercise in workshops at schools, universities, businesses and government agencies.

She's taken lessons from that first exercise in April 1968, a time that can still bring her to tears when she talks about it and tried to change people's minds about prejudice.

Because there was something a lot of people don't remember about that first exercise.

On the following Monday, Elliott reversed the exercise, telling the children that it was blue-eyed students who were smarter. She sent them to lunch first and let them stay at recess longer, the same as before.

But this time, something was different. Elliott noticed that the blue-eyed kids were not as condescending, not as mean, as the brown-eyed kids had been. She asked why.

"They said, ‘I found out what it felt like to be on the bottom, and I did not want to make anyone feel like that ever again,'” Elliott said.